IRS Records Promotion

IRS Records promotional blurb for 1987.

Author: IRS Records (International Record Syndicate Inc).

Date: 5 March 1987.

Original URL: N/A

Article Text

Melbourne, Australia — Hunters & Collectors rebound from their acclaimed 1986 album, Human Frailty, with a 5-song $5.98-list EP entitled Living Daylight (I.R.S.-36017) set for release on March 23. A month later, on April 23, the band opens its 8-week American tour at the Whisky A Go Go in Hollywood before covering most major U.S. cities through June 20.

The EP — which should keep Hunters and Collectors’ name firmly in the limelight until an autumn album release – was co-produced by the band and Greg Edward, best-known for this engineering work with R.E.M. (Lifes Rich Pageant) and John Cougar Mellencamp, and was recorded in the band’s hometown of Melbourne, Australia. It contains three new songs (“Inside A Fireball,” “Living Daylight” and “January Rain”) along with two songs from the group’s Slash LP of ’83, Jaws Of Life (“The Slab” and “Carry Me”), given new vocals and mixes.

Why the impetuous work ethic to return to America short months after their last forat to wage its conquest city by city? Responds frontman Mark Seymour, “If you’re an Australian rock’n’roll band who’s played everywhere there is to play in Australia, you’ve then got two choices: Either stay home and go into semi-retirement, or go overseas.” So why America? “Well, it’s big and it’s the next town on the map. But the way we want to approach it is the same way we’ve approached Australia. We started at the bottom and worked our way up through increating our live audiences for the most part through word-of-moth. And then gradually, our records began to chart.

“We believe that if you can convince a live aiduence of your music, then the whole thing is worth doing. Conversely, if you can’t, then it’s not. It’s called self-promotion and it works. Believeing as we do in the strength of our live performance, we’re eager to take the same risks in America,” Seymour concludes.

The U.S. press has had its own take on Hunters & Collectors based on the Human Frailty LP and its ensuing tour. Craig Lee, in the Los Angeles Times, cited the records “strong, cohesive and sometimes nightmarish look at personal relationships, documenting a band’s playing at the peak of its collective power.” Los Angeles Times reviewer Duncan Strauss, describing the band’s kickoff American date, called them “riveting” and “enormously provocative.” Cary Farling in RAM magazine noted that while Hunters & Collectors first appeared on these shores three years back with an “intensely physical, bass-drive set that combined the power of the pre-historic with material is “almost promal in its simplicity, digging deeper emotionallity than standard-issue pop rock.”